Inside the Vacant Tabernacle

Wombs emptied too soon

like homes beneath the Quabbin—

a water-filled wound.

Nexus

Where is the crux of time’s continuum,

the terminal of every wormhole?

Where do all spirits, whether luminous

or ruined, converge in a whirlwind?

Lost in the swirl of wings and fiery eyes,

both tweakers and time travelers end their trips there.

All bullets break through space’s barriers

and burrow in the marrow of the man there.

Rippling through space and time,

all prayers reach there and finally rhyme.

At the core of contradiction,

the sign of perpendicular lines,

lies the site where all sacrifices unite.

Empty Rooms

In the hush before the exhale,

the apparent emptiness of lungs

actually saturated with air and life,

whispers sneak out of the silence,

converge, and await their birth as words.

Other vacant spaces shush in expectation:

starved stomachs, aborted bellies’ absences,

empty rooms, derelict ships, deserted tombs,

old battlefields with blood dissolved to dirt,

prisons that could not contain apostles

aided by angels typically invisible,

and the Good Friday tabernacle—

not inhabited, not abandoned,

but a haunted, hallowed box.

And these words cannot confine you;

you refuse to conform to their content

or disfigure yourself to fit their form.

Still, they transfigure in the stillness

of their seemingly hollow syllables,

conveying the echo of the voice

that called forth Creation in the void.

To the Blessed Mother

I. To the Mother in the Manger

Did the very air vibrate,

humming in the humid space

soaked in the Holy Ghost?

Did the sky push down on

you, heavy with the host

of heaven’s angels?

And did you feel the heat

as you were caught in the cross-

fire of God’s gaze on God?

II. To the Mother at the Cross

When the cross’s splinters stabbed your heart,

did you feel space unravel and rip

like the temple veil tearing apart?

When you knelt at the event horizon,

did the hole in heaven suck out the light

as the piercing wind was rising?

And when you saw the wound in space-time weep,

did time rewind, the cross now a cradle

where your baby cries himself to sleep?

III. To the Mother at Pentecost (Pentecost by Jean II Restout)

As the men cower beneath the burning shower,

you appear at peace; your smile seems to greet the fire

not as pain and napalm, but as a dear old friend,

as the heated spirit who came so long ago

and softly kissed you on that cool Nazarene night,

letting you wear his shadow like the warmest shawl.

Yet he knew you even within the silent womb

that swaddled you, when he suffused you cell by cell

and whispered purity into your brand-new blood.